Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2015 May 21

= May 21 =

How to pronounce the "v." in court cases?
Is Roe v. Wade pronounced "Roe vee Wade" or "Roe versus Wade"? My other car is a cadr (talk) 03:01, 21 May 2015 (UTC)


 * I've heard it pronounced both ways in various news stories. Dismas |(talk) 03:14, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Yup... it's pronounced both ways. Blueboar (talk) 03:28, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
 * What Blueboar said. Lawyers and those involved in legal fields are more apt to use "Roe vee," but either works. GregJackP   Boomer!   03:33, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
 * In at least some countries it's also pronounced as "'n", meaning "and". I was talking to a niece of mine who's a lawyer in Canada just the other day and noticed her using this pronunciation. --174.88.135.200 (talk) 04:31, 21 May 2015 (UTC)


 * In England, lawyers would refer to the case as 'Roe and Wade'. Sometimes you get a case with multiple defendants - for example, R. v. Dudley and Stephens - which is referred to by the name of the defendants only - ie. 'Dudley and Stephens'.


 * How non-lawyers would refer to such a case is up to them; there is no right or wrong answer. 81.141.215.133 (talk) 06:32, 21 May 2015 (UTC)


 * I remember when Kramer vs. Kramer was a current movie and a frequent topic of conversation. A friend of mine was a first year law student at the time, and whenever the movie was mentioned, he would be certain to pointedly call it "Kramer AND Kramer", which always stopped the rest of us in our tracks.  He, with his decades of legal training, would explain that that was the one and only correct way to say "vs".  Well, maybe so in Commonwealth countries, but not so in the USA.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  07:00, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
 * In the UK, the conventional system is to say "and" for civil cases: Rylands v Fletcher = "Rylands and Fletcher", and to say "against" for criminal cases: R v Wallace = "The King against Wallace". (Geoffrey Rivlin (2012), Understanding the Law (6th ed), Oxford, p 21). Tevildo (talk) 08:27, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Although criminal lawyers generally just refer to the case by the name of the defendant. So to use your example, R. v. Wallace would usually be referred to (other than in formal settings) simply as Wallace. (The practice mentioned by 81.141.215.133 above is broader than just cases with two defendants.) It can sometimes be difficult, without context or knowledge of the case in question, to know whether a case referred to in speech as "Smith and Jones" is the civil case of Smith v. Jones or the criminal case of R. v. Smith and Jones. Proteus (Talk) 11:53, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
 * @ and everyone else who knows about these things: The UK civil terminology has from time to time become contentious at Jarndyce and Jarndyce and there has been a RM at Talk:Jarndyce and Jarndyce. Could someone supply a reference to a reliable source for the terminology at this article and otherwise help out? Thincat (talk) 14:42, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
 * User:JackofOz, whilst your law student friend ("with his decades of legal training" in "first year law") might have substituted "and" for "versus", it certainly isn't how "vs" is pronounced. Aside from that, the name of the film is properly pronounced however its title is officially marketed, which was quite definitely "Kramer versus Kramer", irrespective of what the 'proper' parlance might be in legal circles. So your pedantic friend was just wrong.-- Jeffro 77 (talk) 10:13, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
 * As we told him at the time. But he knew better, and there was no telling him.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  11:41, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

It's and in England. That's how I was taught at law school; and in criminal cases R is pronounced The Queen. It is short for Regina because crimes are officially prosecuted by the Crown. Hence, R. v Brown becomes The Queen and Brown.149.254.224.222 (talk) 09:34, 24 May 2015 (UTC)


 * Of course, R is sometimes pronounced The King. DuncanHill (talk) 10:49, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
 * And sometimes, people whose name is Smith or Brown or Jones or whatever - but not "Dead" - are pronounced "dead". Strange language we have.  Maybe this post will be pronounced "a great success", but I doubt it.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  21:37, 27 May 2015 (UTC)

Visa Waiver Program
The visa waiver program seems to favours Europeans. Previous US visa policy were openly racist when they favoured Europeans. So is the current European favouring eligibility also due to racism or something else? 78.144.251.38 (talk) 07:17, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
 * The article tells us that (after markup-stripping):
 * The criteria for designation as program countries are specified in Section 217 (c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (Title 8 U.S.C. § 1187).[1] The criteria stress passport security and a very low nonimmigrant visa refusal rate: not more than 3% as specified in Section 217 (c)(2)(A) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, as well as ongoing compliance with the immigration law of the United States.
 * If you ask whether this is due to racism, it seems to me that you're inviting mere opinions. Are you asking whether these apparently impartial standards are actually interpreted in a racist way? -- Hoary (talk) 08:06, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
 * According to this article, Qatar, Oman and South Africa should have been offered the program. They are more stable and employed than many listed European countries. This makes me wonder if their majority African and Asian ethnicity has something to do with it as it had in the past. Is my racism-theory correct? 78.144.251.38 (talk) 09:00, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
 * We do not answer requests for opinions. Including opinions as to whether your theories are correct. AndyTheGrump (talk) 09:06, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Please provide citations for your claims. The source you linked to doesn't say "Qatar, Oman and South Africa should have been offered the program". It simply mentions that these 3 countries meet one of the criteria. Nil Einne (talk) 13:51, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Since you say its racist, why would you want to go there anyways? Almost a moot point methinks. btw- many [Black-majority] CARICOM countries, for example, don't need visas in places such as the uk and even Switzerland.120.62.7.103 (talk) 12:00, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

America
What was the [indigenous] term for America before Vespucci and the European came over? Was there a unified term for the entire continental island (many traders did cross what are state borders today)? Of course all the tribes and societies have/had their own language, so they may be more than one term, if any.120.62.7.103 (talk) 12:02, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
 * If I'm not mistaken, Charles C. Mann covers this in his excellent book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. The answer is "nothing".  The people who lived here before European contact had no common culture, and no common understanding of the entire planet, with concepts like "continents" and the like.  They had ideas like "land" and "sea" and "sky", but concepts like "Europe" or "The Americas" did not exist for them in any meaningful way.  -- Jayron 32 12:09, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Same, incidentally, for all the other continents. Note the anomaly when it comes to the notion of "Europe", though, which is a "continent" that is not actually a continent, geographically speaking. That by itself should give away who it was that did the naming. Btw, Vespucci did not discover America. He simply claimed to have been the first to identify that area as a new continent (as opposed to it being the eastern edge of Asia) and someone who apparently took his claim seriously used a Latin form of Vespucci's first name to designate that new part of the world. The use of a first name was a bit unusual (except for monarchs) but in hindsight it was a good choice: just imagine "the United States of Vespuccia (US of V)". Contact Basemetal   here  12:51, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Well, except that the old world had a (to them) natural continental division: the Mediterranean Sea (lit. "The Center of the Earth"). From the Mediterranean point-of-view, you could divide the land into continents based on cardinal directions: Europe to the North, Asia to the East, and Africa to the south.  The lack of a Western land upset their sense of symmetry, which is why some had to invent a "lost" continent, hence, Atlantis.  The continent never existed, but the name for it persists today in the Atlantic Ocean.  As far as they were concerned, each of those lands extended on from those direction in an indeterminate manner.  The division between Europe and Asia had natural water boundaries (i.e. the Black Sea) as did Asia and Africa (the Red Sea).  The lack of a convenient body of water beyond the Black Sea to divide Asia from Europe certainly upset that original plan, but at the time, it worked well for them.  -- Jayron 32 13:06, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
 * The people living in the Americas before the arrival of Europeans were unaware of other landmasses. In fact, individual societies were generally unaware of any lands more than about 1000 km from their own, so they did not have a concept of continents. Marco polo (talk) 13:24, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
 * They weren't aware of kilometers, either. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 15:05, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
 * They still aren't. Kilometers are French. Contact Basemetal   here  15:54, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
 * No, kilomètres are French, kilometers are American. DuncanHill (talk) 16:02, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Canada has Natives and kilometres. InedibleHulk (talk) 20:20, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
 * And it refers to the Yupik as Inuit, which they aren't. --Trovatore (talk) 20:50, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Federally, yeah. But it also lets both groups largely disregard federal stuff, and officially call themselves anything. So there's a moral balance. Wait, no. Only "First Nations" get band governments. We're evil after all. InedibleHulk (talk) 00:36, 22 May 2015 (UTC)
 * See "Turtle Island (North America)".—Wavelength (talk) 21:12, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
 * No, that's not exactly the same thing, and I don't really like the phrasing in the article that it is the name for North America. Native American cosmogony is certainly not developed enough to recognize what a continent is.  Turtle Island is merely the World Turtle concept as manifested in the Northeastern United States.  It's the name for the world as opposed to this chunk of land.  -- Jayron 32 21:17, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
 * At least I've had a longtime question answered: does "Turtle Island" mean island with turtles, island shaped like a turtle, island that is a turtle, or something else again? Each of these would be translated differently to at least some languages. —Tamfang (talk) 06:50, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

Can or will formal language replace ordinary language in the literary arts?
According to philosophers, poetry and mathematics both seek truth and beauty. Moreover, these two disciplines operate under constrains of precision, rigidity and logical validity. This deep and intimate connection became the foundation of “mathematical poetry”.

This is an example of a minimalist mathematical poem by LeRoy Gorman entitled “The Birth of Tragedy”:

(!+?)^2

Does mathematical poetry signal the literary turn to using formal or symbolic language in creative writing? Are there any critics to this kind of poetry?Rja2015 (talk) 15:30, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
 * No. -- Jayron 32 15:33, 21 May 2015 (UTC)


 * I don't know about criticizing that kind of poetry, but the St. Louis Poetry Center saw something wrong with that particular poet's language thirty years ago, because he came in second. But, as artists do, he didn't let it get him down and by 1990, he was big in Japan.
 * No on the first question. InedibleHulk (talk) 23:50, 21 May 2015 (UTC)


 * There are the best math poems, as decided by the (probably) esteemed critics at PoetrySoup.com. By binary logic, the rest are simply not the best. InedibleHulk (talk) 00:03, 22 May 2015 (UTC)
 * I have read all the poems included in that site's list of "best" math poems. All are execrable, as you'd expect from a site largely targetting doggerel-mongers. Some of Piet Hein's grooks express entertaining mathematical thoughts, but all are expressed in common language (either English or Danish). RomanSpa (talk) 17:38, 22 May 2015 (UTC)


 * This is one of those areas where "philosophers" have (as is very common) expressed themselves unclearly. Mathematicians are to a large extent concerned with statements that are "mathematically true" - that is, can be deduced from an agreed set of prior statements by a clear sequence of intermediate statements. A mathematical truth is often regarded by practitioners as beautiful if it is of great significance or generality, and/or has been deduced using a non-obvious sequence of intermediate statements, and/or tells us something unexpected or useful about the real world that the mathematics is being used to model. Poets, on the other hand, are not concerned that their statements are in any sense literally true, but seek to induce particular thoughts or states of mind in their audience through the use of language such as metaphor and simile, and such oral-language tools as assonance and rhyme. The "truth" of a poem is largely the affirmation or contradiction of pre-existing tendencies within the human mind, and is largely uninteresting except as an examination of mental states. When a poet writes "Proud the hull and dark the prow, of sweat and steel it forged..." he is not giving true information about ship construction, and when he writes "North the fulmar through the smoke, the ship in silence led" he is not suggesting that ship navigation be based on bird behaviour: he is seeking to evoke a state of mind that is "true" in its emotional satisfaction. To put it another way, the "truth" that mathematics is concerned with is different from the "truth" that poetry is concerned with. It isn't meaningful to compare the two. RomanSpa (talk) 18:09, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

Thomas Harcourt's kidney
According to John Aubrey, when Thomas Harcourt (our article is at Thomas Whitbread), was executed and his bowels thrown into the fire, "a butcher's boy standing by was resolved to have a piece of his Kidney which was broyling in the fire", later it was in the possession of one "Roydon, a brewer in Southwark". Aubrey says he saw it, and it was absolutely petrified. Do we know if the kidney has survived? Is it now a relic? Where is it? DuncanHill (talk) 15:41, 21 May 2015 (UTC)


 * This review of 1973 Review of the Patrick Garland/Roy Dotrice's one-man play about the life of Aubrey (noted in our article) claims that among the props used in the play are "the actual jawbone of Thomas More and the .petrified kidney of Sir Thomas Harcourt". No idea if the report is accurate, but if it is, then the kidney still existed in 1973.  No idea how it, and More's jawbone, were obtained to be used in the play.  But it's a lead.  -- Jayron 32 15:50, 21 May 2015 (UTC)


 * Broiling a kidney petrifies it? How does that work? I think I've eaten broiled kidneys, though not human ones. Or was it liver? Contact Basemetal   here  16:01, 21 May 2015 (UTC)


 * The obvious explanation is that it was a giant kidney stone, such as this 2.5 pound specimen: . The fire would merely removed the remaining flesh. StuRat (talk) 16:11, 21 May 2015 (UTC)


 * Flesh will petrify just fine. Mummification, for example.  So long as it is kept free from the sort of microorganisms that would eat it, flesh can survive almost indefinitely; certainly a few centuries is not unreasonable.  -- Jayron 32 16:17, 21 May 2015 (UTC)


 * Yes, but you don't mummify something by "broyling in the fire", as described in the Q. StuRat (talk) 13:27, 22 May 2015 (UTC)


 * Aubrey says "The wonder is, 'tis now absolutely petrified. But 'twas not so hard when he first had it. It being always carried in the pocket hardened by degrees, better than by the fire". Thanks for the Patrick Garland/Roy Dotrice lead - Unfortunately they are both dead, so I can't approach them for information. DuncanHill (talk) 16:21, 21 May 2015 (UTC)


 * Oh how very silly of me, Roy Dotrice is not dead, I'm glad to say! DuncanHill (talk) 16:26, 21 May 2015 (UTC)


 * Not entirely relevant, but here lies Grigori Rasputin's alleged penis. InedibleHulk (talk) 20:11, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

A detail of the boundary between Minnesota and Wisconsin
I'd have said the boundary between Minnesota and Wisconsin consists of part of the course of the St. Croix river going as far south as its confluence with the Mississippi River, and downstream from there it's the Mississippi River, and north of the point where the St. Croix forms the boundary it's a straight line going northward until, or almost until, it reaches the western extreme of Lake Superior.

Looking at this map a few miles southeast of Prescott, Wisconsin, I see the boundary appearing to leave the main channel of the Mississippi and following a narrower channel southwest of the main channel and rejoining the main channel about a half-mile downstream from there. Zooming in, it appears to be labeled "Big River". But the Big River is supposed to be a river in Wisconsin flowing into the Mississippi somewhere near there. This channel labeled "Big River" seems to be on the wrong side of the Mississippi to be a river in Wisconsin, and it looks like a channel a half-mile long rather than a river 13 miles long in Wisconsin. What exactly is happening here? Michael Hardy (talk) 21:59, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Rivers change their courses but legal boundaries don't always follow. The border may be defined as the middle of the waterway as it existed on a certain date. Rmhermen (talk) 22:50, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
 * This sort of thing happens often along state boundaries defined (at the time the state's boundaries were first drawn) by the Mississippi River in particular. For most of its course, the Mississippi meanders over a broad floodplain, resulting in relatively frequent changes of position, especially before the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began working to stabilize the course of the river in the late 1800s.  Marco polo (talk) 23:04, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
 * The principle is that when the river drifts gradually across its floodplain, the state border drifts with the river. When the river abandons it's old channel and completely cuts a new channel (see Meander cutoff for example), then the state border remains with the former channel.  This has happened all over the place, and resulted in geographic oddities like Kaskaskia, Illinois (caused by river channel jumping) and the Kentucky Bend (caused by a drifting river channel which moved the border).  -- Jayron 32 00:18, 22 May 2015 (UTC)
 * According to the linked article, the Kentucky bend was not formed by a "drifting river channel" but arose accidentally from the way the boundary was specified, similarly to Point Roberts, Washington. I'm not aware of any cases where a drifting channel formed that sort of anomaly (which certainly is not to say that there aren't any).
 * Another notable example of natural channel jumping is Carter Lake, Iowa, which since 1877 has been on the Nebraska side of the Missouri River. A similar example where the channel was moved artificially is Marble Hill, a part of the New York borough of Manhattan that's been on the Bronx side of the Harlem River since 1914.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.88.135.200 (talk) 04:10, 22 May 2015 (UTC)
 * No, when originally mapped it was contiguous with the rest of Kentucky. The New Madrid Earthquake caused the river channel to drift dramatically (without leaving its channel as in a cutoff).  See  and .  Both sources cite the movement of the river channel caused by the earthquake as the reason for the bend.  -- Jayron 32 04:16, 22 May 2015 (UTC)
 * In the second source, "Kentucky Bend" is written in capitals and small capitals, indicating a cross-reference. That is to page 491, where you will see the enclave explained as the result of a surveying error (which is what I should have said above, rather than referring to the original specification).  It is, of course, possible that the earthquake moved the river far enough that, when the states agreed to use the surveyed line as the boundary, that decision created the enclave. --174.88.135.200 (talk) 20:56, 22 May 2015 (UTC)
 * Further to this, check out this 1775 map of the river. If you mouse over the map, a gray scale icon appears and you can click "+" to enlarge, then click and drag to see the part you want.  Unfortunately it's hard to relate the map to a modern one because so many place names have changed, but near the top you can see the confluence with the Ohio River.  If you scan south from that point, you will see Wolf Island: see Wolf Island, Missouri.  South of that the river makes an N-shaped double bend, where some islands are labeled "Sound Islands".  That has got to be the Kentucky Bend, with New Madrid at the point where the map shows a "Cheponssea or Sound River" flowing into the Mississippi.  (That river doesn't seem to exist today as shown on the map, but perhaps it's what Google Maps shows as Saint John Bayou, and the mapmaker mistook what direction it flowed from.)  Anyway, if this interpretation is correct it means that while the New Madrid quakes may have altered the exact configuration of the Kentucky Bend, they clearly did not create it. --174.88.135.200 (talk) 23:30, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

None of the above appears to explain why that channel is labeled "Big River" when the Big River is supposed to be a river in Wisconsin that is a tributary of the Mississippi. Michael Hardy (talk) 04:37, 22 May 2015 (UTC)
 * It is possible that that's just an error in the Google Map—such errors are hardly unknown occurences. The USGS topographic map for the area does not have a label for that side channel, and I'm not seeing a "Big River" label on any online map other than the Google one. On the other hand "Big River" is an extremely common name in the U.S., and it's possible that someone calls that side channel Big River; but it's apparently not a name recognized by the U.S. government. (From the Google aerial image, it appears that the channel may be silting up and losing its connection with the Mississippi, turning into an oxbow lake.) Deor (talk) 11:37, 22 May 2015 (UTC)
 * It could even be an intentional error. Google only recently turned off a number of user submission features in Map Maker due to such intentional errors or misuse . (This allowed people to make changes on the map, I presume it include modifying names of features.) Nil Einne (talk) 19:44, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

Thank you to all who participated here. Michael Hardy (talk) 22:40, 27 May 2015 (UTC)